He obtained his PhD from the
University of Utah. Wanlass invented
CMOS (complementary
MOS)
logic circuits with
Chih-Tang Sah in 1963, while working at
Fairchild Semiconductor. Wanlass was given
U.S. patent #3,356,858 for "Low Stand-By Power Complementary Field Effect Circuitry" in 1967. In 1963, while studying
MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) structures, he noted the movement of charge through
oxide onto a
gate. While he did not pursue it, this idea would later become the basis for
EPROM (erasable
programmable read-only memory) technology. In 1964, Wanlass moved to
General Micro-electronics (GMe), where he made the first commercial MOS
integrated circuits, and a year later to
General Instrument Microelectronics Division in New York, where he developed
four-phase logic. He was also remembered for his contribution to solving threshold voltage stability in MOS transistors due to sodium ion drift. In 1991, Wanlass was awarded the
IEEE Solid-State Circuits Award. In 2009, on the 50th anniversary of both the MOSFET and the integrated circuit, Frank Wanlass was inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of CMOS logic. He was part of the 2009 class celebrating
semiconductor pioneers, along with inventors of semiconductor technologies such as the MOSFET (
Mohamed Atalla and
Dawon Kahng),
planar process (
Jean Hoerni),
EPROM (
Dov Frohman) and
molecular-beam epitaxy (
Alfred Y. Cho). ==References==